With advancement of increasingly powerful computing devices and expansion of data storage capacity in large scale, networked data centers have moved consumer and business-oriented applications away from local computing environments, to that of computing environments provided over the Internet or other types of networks.
In particular, computer systems have been coupled to one another and to other electronic devices to form both wired and wireless computer networks, over which the computer systems and other electronic units can transfer electronic data. Accordingly, the performance of many computing tasks are distributed across a number of different computer systems and/or a number of different computing environments.
For example, one entity can run an application on machines in another entities' data center. Such arrangement can typically be referred to as “cloud-based” computing systems, wherein applications can be offered as hosted services. When applications are run in the cloud, computing resources and storage resources of the data center are allocated to a user. Accordingly, cloud computing represents a robust computing model, wherein tasks can be assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. The powerful processing power of cloud computing is enabled via distributed, large-scale computing clusters, which typically operate in conjunction with server virtualization software, and parallel processing systems.
Moreover, the computing resources can be maintained within the client enterprise, or made available by a service provider. Such further enables client to benefit from supercomputer-level computing power, wherein clients can access the enormous and elastic resources whenever so is required.
Such model of cloud Computing can further be considered an evolution from concepts of utility computing, autonomic computing, grid computing, and software as a service (SaaS). Moreover, as clients become more sophisticated, they require more than a mere aggregation of such hosted services and usage of pay-per-use resources, and further demand continuous management of the resources as they are consumed.